


Stitch Up All Your Hopes

by subjunctive



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst and Fluff, But only if you squint, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, POV Jon, Pre-Relationship, Sickfic, this is very gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 17:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7540873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subjunctive/pseuds/subjunctive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa is sick, but she refuses to rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stitch Up All Your Hopes

**Author's Note:**

> I dithered over whether the / or & would be more appropriate as the relationship. I'm not usually a fan of tagging both (poor gen readers putting up with that, man, I feel for y'all), but there are enough light hints of ~something~ to make a pure gen reader wary or uncomfortable, but really not enough ship content to comfortably call it shipfic. So everyone gets to be disappointed, I guess. ;)

“You must, Your Grace,” Brienne says with resignation. “She won’t listen to me, she won’t listen to anyone. She’s going to drive herself into an early grave.”

“What makes you think she’ll listen to me, then?”

The Maid of Tarth shrugs one shoulder, as if to say, _Probably she won’t, but it’s worth a try._

Sansa hasn’t really listened to him since they were children, but Jon says, “Fine,” and holds out his hands. Into them Lady Brienne deposits a tray of thin hardbread and broth. He knocks at her door, balancing the tray on one hand precariously.

A suspicious, but clogged, voice needles through the door. “I’m not hungry, Brienne. You may return to your duties, _if_ you please.” There is more than a trace of childish petulance in her voice. Jon sighs.

“It’s only me,” he says. “May I?”

“I suppose you may, so long as it’s only you.” Her voice carries a warning, though it’s too weak and thready to be truly imposing.

Brienne gives him a look, _see what I mean?_ , before excusing herself.

At first glance he wonders if she’s really taken ill at all. There is pink in her cheeks and her eyes are bright as she examines her needlework, leaning against the bedhead. She is the very picture of life itself. But as he draws closer he sees that the brightness of her gaze is glassy, and what he’d taken for a healthy blush is a feverish flush instead. She’s sweating, too, beading at her brow and making her hair stick to her temples.

When Sansa spies the tray in his hand, her eyes narrow, and her needle stills. “I told her I wasn’t hungry.”

Jon has never had the gift of pretty words, and even less since he left the Watch. “Your throat sounds sore. The broth will help.”

She swallows and he can see the pain in it, and she nods toward the edge of the bed, somehow still a regal gesture despite her sniffling, as if were her idea all along. She looks to her lap again, and when he sits next to her he sees the large basket full of torn clothes next to the bed. She’s doing the mending.

He has no desire to scold her, so he only asks, “Trouble keeping it down?”

Sansa squints at her work, frowns, nods.

He balances the tray on his thighs. “The new maester thinks hardbread will help with that. Just a little?”

She sighs through her nose, her displeasure clear, but her slim fingers lay aside her work and break off a tiny piece of bread. She crumbles it even smaller in her palm and eats it bit by bit, daintily, like the pecking of a bird.

Jon holds up a spoonful of broth to help her wash it down. She glares.

“Aren’t you a little old for playing dragons and ravens?” he asks gravely, and the corner of her lips curls up just so, before she sips from his spoon.

They settle into an easy, quiet rhythm. Any time he spends in Sansa’s company is the best part of his day. They have spent years apart and they’re still nothing alike--Jon feels it keenly when her gentle words smooth over his own too-blunt ones and silences at dinner--but it is enough to know that there is someone else, someone who sees what he sees and feels what he feels when he looks at Winterfell and his chest aches for the newfound realization of its ephemerality, for its preciousness. Sometimes she gives him the same look, and sometimes he returns it.

When she finishes eating--not much, but more than she’d managed in the past two days--her attention returns to her work. _Working, she won’t stop working,_ Brienne had said.

His fingers close on her hands, which still. Funny. He’d thought her fingers would be smooth, a lady’s silken hands. They are that, certainly more than his, but she has callouses too, rough from her needlework. His own slip over them.

“Why not get some rest?”

Her head swings, back and forth, and if he didn’t know better he would say she’s drunk.

“I’m not getting anyone sick,” she insists, a queer sort of fear in her voice. “I was careful.”

He thinks of a startled filly and how to calm it. He squeezes her fingers gently. “I know, love. No one’s upset with you. They’re just a bit concerned. You see why they might be worried?”

Her pink lips purse, and her bright, bright eyes cast down. “I’ll be fine. I can make myself useful in the meantime.”

“You don’t need to.” Attempting to introduce some levity to their conversation, he adds, “The castle will go on without you. I promise.”

She doesn’t smile. Her face crumples. In this state he can see every quiver of her muscles, every instinct she would normally hide under her graceful mask. It feels almost sacrilegious, to see what she would wish to hide. He has not begrudged her that mask even if he has wanted from time to time for her to slip it off for him.

“I’m sorry,” he says awkwardly, a little desperately. He has never been good with women’s tears. “I don’t…” _You know nothing, Jon Snow._

A muscle tics in her jaw, and her gaze slants away from him, ashamed and angry all at once. Her voice is brittle, thin. “I know the castle will be fine. I don’t know what I’m doing here at all. What use does Winterfell have for me?”

Jon sucks in a breath. “Sansa…”

She chews her lip, and he watches the delicate bob of her throat as she swallows.

“Is that why you’re doing all the mending, instead of letting your ladies look after it?”

With a pinched face, she offers a reluctant nod.

Jon is no stranger to the desire to make oneself useful. The shadows under her eyes, the faint purple of fading bruises, speak to her determination. It would be futile to suggest she has no need to work, that she needn’t worry about being useful; that too he knows all too intimately from experience. Instead he takes a different tack.

“You need sleep. Let yourself rest, and you’ll be better prepared to work on the morrow.” He has every intention of making sure she works lightly, if at all, but she doesn’t need to know that.

She lets him remove the fabric, needle, and thread. “Worse than Arya’s, probably,” she murmurs discontentedly.

Jon pretends to inspect the stitching, then shakes his head and says solemnly, “Not even close.”

They share a smile between them, one of those moments when his chest feels about to split open with that ache of recognizing both all he has lost and all he has gained. When he rises to leave her in peace, her fingers--so slim, he’s never noticed, except now he can’t stop noticing--leap to encircle his wrist. Her grip is surprisingly strong for someone abed with illness. In his time at the Wall he had heard of great feats being performed by those in desperation and danger, and he thinks of them now.

“Stay,” she pleads with him, her nail worrying at the skin of his inner wrist. “Until I fall asleep.” She rolls back the blankets beside herself, uncovering a place for him. The Lord's bed. A place he has always desired, in his secret heart. Now it is the Lady's bed.

“Please,” she says, pathetically, and he cannot deny her.

“Only if you promise not to sneeze on me,” he says, and after unlacing his boots, crawls in beside her.

She rewards him with a watery smile and her head pillowed on her shoulder. They are both silent for a time. He watches the flickering flames grow dimmer without attention, and the sun--always short in winter--dips below the castle wall outside, casting everything in shadow and firelight, warm and hazy and half a dream. 

When she speaks again, her voice surprises him; he assumed she was drowsing. “Do you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“I do,” she murmurs. “When we were little and there was a storm, I used to crawl into Robb’s bed, and you were there too sometimes, and we would all sleep together.”

The memory flows up into his mind in fragments, like flotsam long forgotten but dredged up by her words. “You would insist on lying between us and make us swear to protect you.” He’s surprised she remembers it. She can’t have had more than four or five namedays at the most. Still too young to scorn the word of a bastard half-brother.

Her fingers thread through his, stroking, and in the sudden rush of affection that follows he almost forgets to breathe.

“Fear not,” he says, squeezing her hand, “your gallant knight will protect you.”

“I wish I believed in true knights anymore,” she whispers. “I almost do, because of you.”

Her words make his throat thick with all the things he cannot say, all the things he has no words for. When finally she falls asleep, he does not move, even though he can hear the clamor of dinner and he will surely be missed. Instead he leans his head against hers and thinks this quiet thrum of heartbeats and hearth fire is worth catching her sickness for. Worth almost anything he might endure.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr at http://subjunctivemood.tumblr.com if you want to say hi over there.


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